Sampling the View From the Roof

Each week in Curtain Raisers, we invite a local theater artist to attend a show of his or her choosing and discuss the results. On Saturday night Fisher Stevens opted to see Tennessee Williams's "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," directed by Rob Ashford, at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. Mr. Stevens was a founding member of the theater company Naked Angels, and a regular on stages and screens throughout the 1980s and '90s. In the past decade he has added the roles of producer and director to his résumé, including for the Oscar-winning 2009 documentary "The Cove" (producer) and the new senior-citizen gangster comedy "Stand Up Guys" (director), which opens Friday.

After "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," in the back seat of a livery cab driving down the FDR, Mr. Stevens became nostalgic for life in the theater. "I just feel like who I really am, deep down, is a theater actor."

The heavyweight stars of his new film "Stand Up Guys"—Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin—are also veterans of the New York stage. "When you're on a movie set, if you're with a theater actor, you have your own language," he said. "You have a natural trust and ability to work with each other. There's a kinship."

It was a satisfying night with Williams's still-resounding 1955 masterpiece that had spurred these reflections. When the curtain rises at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, the crickets are chirping on a balmy evening at the Pollitt estate in Mississippi, and we're in the bedroom of Maggie (Scarlett Johansson) and Brick (Benjamin Walker), where the entire show is staged. We learn that family patriarch Big Daddy (Ciaran Hinds) believes he's been given a clean bill of health, but his sons' wives, who have designs on his fortune, know otherwise. It's just one of many secrets swelling over the course of the evening, another being the apparent chastity Brick and Maggie's marriage.

ENLARGE

Fisher Stevens attended a recent performance of 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.'
Lizzie Simon for The Wall Street Journal

"None of them are living truthfully," Mr. Stevens said. "I forgot how blatant it was in this play."

Mr. Stevens studied Williams's work early in his career while under the tutelage of Uta Hagen. "She made me realize how tough Williams was," he said. "When it's done right, it's magical. When it's done wrong, it's miserable."

On Saturday night he found the production much more to the magical side. During intermissions and backstage after the show, he kvelled over Ms. Johansson's performance as Maggie the Cat. "Isn't she amazing?" he said, numerous times. The show ultimately transcended any quibbles he had with it, delivering a direct rendition of the classic: "This production is really clear. They just lay it out."

"Stand Up Guys" is a comedy and bares little resemblance to "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," but they're both pre-occupied with authenticity and mortality. "Guys" follows three former gangsters whooping it up on death's door. In both works, characters who have spent their lives chasing security have ended up imprisoned, literally or figuratively, and they've waited until death is imminent to express themselves authentically. "But why wait, you know?" said Mr. Stevens. "Why wait?"

This was the message that "Cat" had left him with, and it was also largely what drew him to "Stand Up Guys." A particularly affecting scene in "Cat" occurred in the second act, when Big Daddy confronts his injured, alcoholic son Brick, whose sexuality and self-destruction are sources of much gossip and tension in the house. Father and son trade barbs, beat each other up and essentially beg one another to connect more intimately. Eventually they get to the heart of things: Brick drinks to escape his disgust with the pervasive dishonesty swirling around and inside of him. The two reach a kind of desperate understanding of one another, but it's too late for both of them.

"We make our own prisons," said Mr. Stevens. "We put ourselves in situations in which we're so afraid to communicate with people we love and it results in so much destruction."

Here and at other key dramatic moments in the show, Mr. Stevens had had the urge to jump onto the stage. He missed the theater, he said. So why wait?

"Well, it's been both a blessing and a curse that I'm interested in many things," he said, elaborating that he is currently in pre-production to direct a film adaptation of Philip Roth's "American Pastoral." And he's two years into working on a documentary about Dr. Sylvia Earle, aka "Her Deepness," the 77-year-old oceanographer who has logged more than 7,000 hours of underwater research during her career.

"Here's my dream," he said. "Finish the documentary, direct 'American Pastoral,' and then get on the stage."

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